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Is it just me or have online job boards absolutely fucked themselves into full blown enshittification over the past decade? I mean, yes, they look nice (compared to ~2005 monster.com) but fuck me if most of them aren't pants on head stupid. That and the whole process of job postings, and interviews, and basically just the whole "look for job" experience.

I mean, site wise, yes great, add your skills. Except, you know, a lot of the skills I have can't be listed because they're not in your pre-defined list of skill and you don't let people free-form them because well fuck, I guess search is hard. (Hire me, I'm okay at search! I think...)

If I've just entered all my experiences and past work history, why the fuck do you want me to upload a PDF of my resume? Why not just generate one off the data I've just given you? Or vice versa, if I upload my resume, why the fuck can't you just pre-fill my work experience and let me massage that into being correct? Why do I have to do this, again?

And then there's the job postings themselves. I mean, that probably hasn't really changed, back in the day they were also like "Python Developer wanted" and it turns out that Python isn't actually what you'll be doing, no, instead you'll be doing Java and a lot of systems admin work, and oh yeah maybe a tiny bit of Python. Maybe.

These days at least it seems that's gotten more "correct", but now it's all down to the remote working. So you do a search, explicitly checking the "100% remote only" box. And you get a bunch of results.

More than 75% of those? Yeah, no, not 100% remote. 100% remote for 1 or 2 days per week, maybe. That's just... fuck. No. Fuck off.

I wanted remote work, not "we'll remote-wash this job posting so we'll get people who want to work remote {for whatever reason} to look at it" - and they wonder why their candidate pool is so small.

Then we haven't even gotten into things like salary. I mean, I'm not greedy, I'd like to make enough to live on, like, pay my bills, buy my groceries, have some left for savings, and have some left to go for a drink or a dinner with my girlfriend on a regular enough basis she doesn't murder me in my sleep.

But no. No. Senior Devops engineer. Expected to have 10 years plus of experience. Expected to know every last goddamn ci/cd tool in existence, IaC tooling, all the OS'es, and oh yeah you need to actually know React too (for a devops engineer job, fuck outta here...).

And the salary? 30% less than what I was making in my last job. Which was pretty much doing the exact same thing as this job wants (minus the React...). And this is supposed to be a great salary (as it was described in the job post itself).

I mean at this rate I might as well just start throwing out resume's like it's candy and hoping some of it sticks to someone's fingers and they might be inclined to want to interview me.

Which, also, has gotten way more annoying. Applied for a job. Got an interview. Can I record a 2 minute video explaining why I want this job pretty please?

Haaah no. No. Fuck that. skip

Next interview (yes, I do get some...); okay a video call, great. So um, why... isn't your camera on? Why do you want mine on, but yours isn't? Again, fuck that. Not doing it.

If you do manage to get all that out of the way and you had your interview - oh, right, you want me to do an interview with who? Oh... the team, okay, makes sense. Bu... wait what do you mean there's 6 interview rounds?

No. Just. fucking. no.

I'll do an initial interview, I'll be more than happy to talk to team members, and I'll be even happier to talk to the CTO or whoever ends up being my boss, but that's where it ends. Any more than that just feels like I'm getting jerked around, and to be perfectly honest, if there is to be jerking I'd rather do it myself because well, I know how I like to get my crank yanked.

And on that bombshell... actually, no, not leaving just yet - I am in fact still looking for some gainful employment. 100% remote (and I'll gladly discuss why that's a hard requirement for me), doing devops engineering, or observability stuff, or just plain old development-of-things-in-a-supposedly-dead-language. I'm not (that) expensive. I'm also not as grumpy as this post makes me look.

But if you want to hire me because of my skills and experience and what I can bring to the table? Don't play games. Because I am old, grumpy, and stubborn enough to just moonwalk right out.